Indian IT giant Infosys' founder, chairman and chief mentor NR Narayana Murthy is proud of his children. His employees don't have the same credentials, he told the Economic Times.
He admires Singapore's Mentor Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, hence the title, "chief mentor", reports the Telegraph.
The man, who started Infosys 28 years ago with Rs 10,000 borrowed from his wife, is now worth around $1.8 billion, says the Economic Times. The Nasdaq-registered Infosys is India's second largest IT firm.
The Economic Times reports:
He did not rule out the possibility of his son Rohan and daughter Akshata joining Infosys at some point, but said, “Ideally they may want to run their own marathon as today Infosys has reached a certain level where opportunities or rather rewards of being an entrepreneur are much less.”
The proud father said his daughter is an MBA from Stanford and son is doing his PhD at Harvard. “Both, by any standards, have done well for themselves. We don’t have any employee in the company today with those kind of credentials,” he said.
Now he wants to start a venture fund to invest in new ideas that create value for society.
Meanwhile, Sunanda K Datta-Ray, an eminent Indian journalist who has worked for the Straits Times in Singapore, writes in the Telegraph:
It’s not only his Chief Mentor title that N.R. Narayana Murthy, the Infosys founder, has taken from Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew whom he greeted in 2005 with the memorable words: “I have two heroes. One is Mahatma Gandhi, and the other is you!” Infosys’s CM seems also to have taken to heart the Singapore MM’s advice to join politics.
“When will we have people like you going for elections?” Lee had asked when they met, saying he could “transform India” by multiplying Infosys’s culture of excellence. Lee regretted later that Narayana Murthy laughed away his suggestion.
CM is still coy about taking the plunge. “I am too old to contest an election,” he says.
But he has extended support to a raft of Independent candidates.
A collection of his speeches is coming out as a book, A Better India, A Better World, tomorrow. The Times of India interviewed him about the book.
